After a two-year wait that surely felt like a few lifetimes to devoted fans, Justin Bieber made his way Wednesday night back to the Palace of Auburn Hills.

Applying his curlicue vocals and elastic dance moves to a set of booming dance-pop and cotton-candy ballads, the 18-year-old pop sensation drew shrieks from a capacity, teen-heavy crowd that appeared to number about 17,000. (Show officials declined to release an attendance figure.)

It was the second Detroit concert of Bieber's young career -- first since a 2010 show at the same venue -- and it came midway through a seven-month global tour in support of his third album, “Believe.”

This was pop spectacle at its most fine-tuned: Bieber, decked in white, was lofted across the stage by wires as the show kicked off, a massive pair of wings strapped to his back. Bursts of fireworks, bombs of confetti and piercing lasers set the tone for a show that would be heavy on showbiz thrills.

“You ready to party with me?” he asked the crowd early on. It was the easiest question of the night for a high-energy audience armed with glow sticks and pastel-hued cell phones, some of whom had been on site since 7 in the morning.

On the arena concourse it was like Black Wednesday as fans queued up dozens deep – even with the show underway inside -- to gobble up $35 T-shirts and other Bieber merch.

Bieber is a kind of living, breathing Twitter trending topic, and each week seems to bring a hot new batch of headlines. He rolled into the Palace on the heels of both the bad (a split with girlfriend Selena Gomez) and good (cleared of charges in an alleged paparazzo scuffle).

But Wednesday night was all about the show, a brisk 90-minute affair of hits, snappy choreography and minimal chatter between songs. A four-piece band, DJ and crew of male and female dancers were predictably strong but unobtrusive enough never to steal focus from the kid at center stage.

Having launched the night with a shot of upbeat dance music — “All Around the World” — Bieber maneuvered through a set heavy on “Believe” material: the glossy balladry of “Catching Feelings,” the wiry beat of “Take You,” the festive encore performance of “Boyfriend.”

A mid-show video sequence of news footage spotlighted the relentless crush of media attention continuously directed his way. Along with the paparazzi-battling choreography of “She Don’t Like the Lights,” it drove home the reality that Bieber just might be more interesting as a cultural phenomenon than a musical act — the first pop superstar groomed by the Internet for an audience that has grown up knowing nothing else.

Teen-heartthrob pop involves a time-tested brand of theater — catering to fantasies, playing to type — and it would be pointless to knock Bieber’s carefully timed winks and convenient tugs up on the shirt. When a broken string led a sad-faced Bieber to abandon his acoustic guitar ahead of “Fall,” you may have felt compelled to hit Google to make sure it wasn’t part of the nightly shtick.

But even knowing that, it was hard Wednesday to escape the sense of a guy onstage playing the part of “Justin Bieber.” Sometimes, it seemed, he simply wasn’t having fun — and oddly, the show was lacking the kind of personal connection he has so meticulously cultivated online with fans. One of the evening’s most ostensibly intimate songs, the acoustic “Be Alright,” found him in a boom lift high above stage, rotating to give fans a 360° view but ultimately only serving to create distance.

At 18, Bieber is still figuring out this whole thing, and clearly he’s found an audience that looks happy to stick around as he quickly matures beyond YouTube puppy love. The detractors might not want to hear it, but Justin Bieber isn’t going away, and Wednesday probably wasn't the last time the Palace gets filled to the brim for the cause.